“Google’s modus operandi is to step into a vacuum that used to be the function of the state.”

This from MSNBC, no less. That bastion of radical Marxist anti-neo-liberal corporate critique!

I’m fascinated by this sentence. But why is it startling? For decades, this has been the pattern. Government disinvestment creates market opportunities for corporations to step in and fulfill the tasks that government used to accomplish. Blackhawk - Social Security privatization - corporate control of water - everywhere we look, governments are helping corporations help themselves to massive taxpayer contracts to provide basic services to people.

It might be startling because we want to think that Google is different. That our intimate relationship with them (they own all my data!) exempts them from the normal rules that govern every other corporation. That their DIY origins and cute “don’t be evil” motto and open-source insistence with Android all add up to a different kind of beast. And it isn’t. It’s a corporation. BP, Nestle, Union Carbide, Google - they’re like teenage boys with one thing on their minds. Except it’s not sex. It’s the ruthless destruction of their competitors, and the accelerating exploitation of resources (including customers and employees).

It’s also startling because we don’t want to think about commodification of the internet. We don’t want to think of it as one more service to be chopped up and handed to grisly corporations to mess with. I’m not just talking about our need to fight back against bullshit like these new attacks on net neutrality - which are the immediate spur for this MSNBC article’s re-evaluation of Google’s identity. I’m talking about the very idea of the internet as we know it. Yeah, the telecoms run it, yeah, it’s full of paid services, but there is an essential anti-capitalist democracy to it. So much of the key stuff is free - email accounts, mapping, research capacity, social networking, publication tools (blogging, etc). Many homeless people I work with use the internet extensively, without paying a dime for it. They use it at the library, at friends’ houses, at our office - they have free email accounts - they use Google to hunt for jobs and find recreational activities. Just like most of us do.  And if Google’s starting to make ominous signs that net neutrality might be an endangered species, what else about the internet might change? What other fundamental features of the internet might be deformed or outright destroyed as the space itself and all the data stored there becomes increasingly commodified?

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